The death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously said in 1996. She was talking about the possible costs of a punishing sanctions regime against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Two dozen years later, the Trump administration’s fixation on so-called maximum-pressure policies against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela — particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — follows in Albright’s bloody footsteps.
The COVID-19 outbreak has made inescapable what should have been obvious already: These campaigns are failures of diplomacy. They are not necessary for U.S. security, which is already guaranteed by deterrence, and they are needlessly cruel to ordinary people who cannot control their governments’ misdeeds. The Trump administration should drop these distractions and focus limited resources on handling the pandemic. Such a shift could start a new era of American diplomacy. Washington could relearn how to operate effectively in a world where bluntly announcing our demands and flexing our muscles demonstrably does not work.
To hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tell it, the administration is already taking a more flexible approach to Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela in light of the coronavirus. “We’ve worked to try and get assistance into North Korea. We’ve made offers of assistance to Iran. You'll recall when we first began, we worked diligently in Venezuela to get humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people as well,” Pompeo said at the end of March.
But this narrative of a benevolent Washington seeking to help the beleaguered populations of these three nations is false. In each case, Pompeo’s offers have been paired with wildly unrealistic ultimatums.
Iran has suffered one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks, and the effects of U.S. sanctions have compounded bad decisions by Tehran, raising the Iranian death toll. Though Pompeo has hinted at willingness to ease U.S. sanctions during the medical crisis, that has not happened. Pompeo claims otherwise, but these sanctions in practice keep Iran from importing critical medical supplies.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has escalated its rhetoric against Iran, refusing to budge on a naïve and counterproductive pressure campaign in which Washington demands everything and offers nothing in return. Predictably, Tehran has not backed down, and we are stuck at an impasse. The United States gains nothing; Tehran makes trouble for U.S. forces (especially in Iraq); and innocent Iranian people bear the brunt of this mutual inanity.
North Korea claims to have no COVID-19 cases, an assertion outside experts suspect is a lie. Though it’s difficult to say what the coronavirus situation may be inside the hermit kingdom, its trade with China makes some level of infection likely. Also suggestive of an unacknowledged outbreak are the unexplained postponement of the annual meeting of the country’s puppet parliament and Pyongyang’s admission that it has 500 people in quarantine.
As with Iran, a COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea will be worse than otherwise thanks to the regime’s tortuous economic policies and pre-existing sanction constraints on delivery of humanitarian aid. Like Iran, the Trump administration’s hardline approach to North Korea has diplomatic progress at a standstill while rhetoric escalates. The details vary; the fundamental problem does not.
The story is basically the same in Venezuela, too. At the end of March, Pompeo offered to ease U.S. sanctions — at the price of U.S.-directed regime change. It was not surprising when Venezuela’s government said no. Venezuela has reported fewer than 200 cases of COVID-19 to date, but it has suffered severe shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities for years due, once again, to a combination of awful domestic governance and U.S.-led sanctions.
Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are very different countries, but the flaw in U.S. relations with each is the same. In every case, Washington does not know how to negotiate, refuses to offer meaningful concessions or make plausible demands, and is irrationally committed to a failed maximum-pressure campaign. The result is useless for American security interests, which with all three nations are indefinitely protected by the United States’ conventional and nuclear deterrence. It’s also destructive to the United States’ reputation abroad and harmful to the millions of Iranians, North Koreans, and Venezuelans who already bear more than their share of misery from their respective regimes.
We can do better for all involved. Washington can reject the inhumane and strategically illiterate calculus that Albright exemplified, and that too many of our officials before and after her have more politely shared. U.S. foreign policy can reorient itself to rely on productive negotiations — patient, mutually beneficial, built on actual give-and-take — instead of pointless sprees of threats, sanctions, and war. We can have a foreign policy of diplomacy, not coercion.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Defense One, and The American Conservative, among other outlets. The views expressed are the author's own.